Some of you may not know this but I am an avid cyclist. So much so that I am brave (or stupid) enough to participate with other like-minded individuals and ‘kit up’ into our sponsor laden spandex outfits (see mamil) and race against each other in the summer months, shoulder to shoulder at 25+ mph for about an hour.
In order to garner good results for yourself in any endurance sport you generally need to follow an annual-ish training plan. Without diving too deeply into current training strategies the plans can often be broken down into smaller components, often down to the day. For each day we plan a particular workout and each workout has a level of expected effort that comes with it, also known as a TSS score or Training Stress Score. Endurance athletes often have a means to measure the work done during each of their workouts, such as heart rate monitors or power meters. Power meters measure the amount of effort you push on the pedals with. Once this data is collected it is then input into a program that can calculate your work in the form of TSS. This gives us a planned TSS and an actual or achieved TSS for each workout.
The planned TSS score is not always exact in that is what you will achieve. This means that we cannot simply use the planned and actual TSS for a timeframe after the vaccination in order to identify the impact of the vaccination on performance. In addition, endurance athletes will train in stages, with some parts of the y ear having more or less TSS than others. In order to account for both of these I took the 14 days prior and the 14 days after. This puts the performance evaluation period for each vaccination in the same or nearly same stage of training.
I compiled the planned and actual TSS for the 14 days before and 14 days after each of my three vaccinations. I then took the difference between the two. You can find the results below.
Looking at the chart above we can see the cumulative difference in the stacked area chart. For the majority of the days before a vaccination the negative performance was limited with one exception. Being a good athlete, I do keep notes on these workouts and I can see that this particular workout had a lot of sprinting on the trainer – something that is notoriously difficult to complete on a trainer vs the outdoors. Outside of this you can see most performance was near the planned TSS.
Post vaccination I did see a larger variation from planned performance, particularly with the 2nd vaccination and the booster (and flu). The first vaccination did seem some drop in performance but also some higher-than-expected performance. These were actually due to completing some outdoor group rides when I had planned on being inside on a trainer. Aside from these rides I still saw small drop in performance for a about three days. I also can state I did not feel ill after the first vaccination.
Finally, the combination booster and flu shot. My thought here was that if I was going to feel ill from both I may as well feel ill and underperform or be off the bike at the same time and overlap this under performance and thus increase the number of days in the year I am not underperforming.
The second vaccination was a different story. I ended up leaving work early the day after to sleep it off at home. This relative difference can also be seen in my performance. After the second vaccination I saw a deep decline in performance for 4 days after which performance recovered back to normal fairly quickly.
This combination impacted my performance more than any other vaccination. Here I had a decline in performance last about 7 days, with a feeling of increased effort continuing for another two weeks or so.
This is a summary of my planned vs actual performance on the bike.
Ultimately, I was able to recover completely from every vaccination but did have a decrease for a short time afterwards. If you’re wondering about what may happen to you perhaps you can find some solace in my experience. As with any of our training, planning continues to be important. There’s no reason that should change. Hopefully this gives you some sense of how to plan.
